IARPA Babel Bengali Language Pack IARPA-babel103b-v0.4b

<h3>Introduction</h3><br>
<p>IARPA Babel Bengali Language Pack IARPA-babel103b-v0.4b was developed by <a href="http://www.appen.com/">Appen</a> for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) <a href="http://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/babel">Babel</a> program. It contains approximately 215 hours of Bengali conversational and scripted telephone speech collected in 2011 and 2012 along with corresponding transcripts.</p><br>
<p>The Babel program focuses on underserved languages and seeks to develop speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language to support keyword search performance over large amounts of recorded speech.</p><br>
<h3>Data</h3><br>
<p>The Bengali speech in this release represents that spoken in India by native speakers of Bengali born in India. The gender distribution among speakers is approximately even; speakers' ages range from 16 years to 65 years. Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments including the street, a home or office, a public place, and inside a vehicle.</p><br>
<p>All audio data is presented as 8kHz 8-bit a-law encoded audio in sphere format. Transcripts are available in two versions: the Bengali script and a romanization scheme developed by Appen Butler Hill, both encoded in UTF-8. Further information about transcription methodology is contained in the documentation accompanying this release.</p><br>
<p>Evaluation data is available from <a href="http://www.nist.gov/">NIST</a> in support of <a href="http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/mig/openkws.cfm">OpenKWS</a>.</p><br>
<h3>Samples</h3><br>
<p>Please view the following samples:</p><br>
<ul><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S08.sph">Audio Sample</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S08.txt">Transcript Sample</a></li><br>
<li><a href="desc/addenda/LDC2016S08.rom.txt">Romanized Transcript Sample</a></li><br>
</ul><br>
<h3>Updates</h3><br>
<p>None at this time.</p></br>
Portions © 2015 U.S. Government

</br>The U.S. Government acquired this data from Appen Pty Ltd, which assigned the copyright to the data to the U.S. Government.